Optimize for WEBP Images – PROBLEM

WPO’s implementation for webp image support and conversion is not all that clear AND ONLY uses the SLOW, SLOW service of reSmush.it.

Support for a faster premium plan is supposedly in the works, but it will come with a price tag… WHY???

Especially since most hosting providers have servers (shared, VPS, dedicated, etc.) that support webp conversion using imagick, cwebp, vips, gd or other libraries and extensions.

Therefore, it does not make sense to use reSmush.it when it can be done easier and faster on your own hosted server. Or your own PC, as there are free and paid webp image conversion programs available (ie, XnConvert) that can convert thousands of images to webp format offline without taking a performance hit on your hosted server.

Okay, so be it. My experience using WP-Optimize’s image converter has been nothing but FAILURE, ERRORS or End-of-the-World SLOW… (All the other features are great and work wonderfully, absolutely world class!)

I tried WPO’s IMAGES portion on my hosted server and on my WAMP install (localhost) for testing purposes. Same results. And no, I do not use a CDN at this time.

There are other plugins that do webp conversion locally (gd, cwebp, imagick) on the fly or pre-processed and stored on server, as well as serving the image format the vistor’s browser can support by HTML rewrites, .htaccess rewrites, javascripts, etc.

But since I bought and paid for WP-Optimize, I prefer to stick to one solution and plugin… Yours

If you want to provide a premium webp conversion service, fine. But you also need to support and allow the following:

(1) Use of hosted server support for gd, imagick, cwebp, etc., for converting images natively to webp.

NOTE: It's funny (NOT) that the WPO's IMAGES page displays "Available WebP conversion tools: ffmpeg, imagick, gd" (in my case), but the plugin DOES NOT USE any of them!

(2) Allow WPO users to create webp images offline (using whatever program or tool they have or use).

The (2) option would require instructions from WPO on webp image filename convention (ie., conversion filename format: image.jpg –> image.jpg.webp) as well as where to store them (webp images) on the hosted server (path and directory structure similar to images stored in the uploads folder?) and a button to click on the WPO IMAGES page that calls a script or function to compare and collate .jpg | .png files to their webp counterparts and store the info (or path info?) in the database for seamless operation of serving the correct image dependant upon the visitor’s browser support of image types.

Well, I guess that’s it. Sort of a complaint, a problem and a suggestion all at once, lol.

• This topic was modified 3 years ago by MyTeeFunny.